Creating your data and analytics roadmap

We were recently joined by Josh King, Director of Marketing Data Science & Analytics at The Knot Worldwide.

At 36:28, we discussed: What goes into creating your data and analytics roadmap?

I’m actually in the midst of this right now– as in the hour before this meeting.

One of the things I like to come back to is from the CTO at my last company. He had this really good framework for thinking through this, and it’s to break it out into 4 things:

1. Your mission

2. Your vision

1. 3. Your maturity model
2. 4. Your strategy

If you want to look it up, his name is Dave Kaplan and he has a great article on Medium: https://medium.com/policygenius-stories/missions-visions-maturity-models-strategies-ce5a4a408ab2

This gets into a good framework for building out and identifying the different aspects of a strategy that you should consider and having a clear alignment for what that will look like.

Generally, a mission is like a single sentence for why your team or your department or your company exists.

Your vision is what it means to succeed within that. So, if I’m thinking through marketing data science & analytics –  I’m thinking what does it mean to have a best in class marketing data science organization across relevant brands?

Your maturity model is, where are you along that map from very basic early foundational building into “I am best in class”?

Then your strategy is how you get from where you are now to where you want to be in your vision. So, this really aligns a good framework for what it is that you’re building out.

And to the other part of your question, does it cover all data work?

I have data scientists and analytics that report into me, but there’s also some of a dotted line from all of our data engineers that focus on marketing problems so that can include BI, data operations, data warehouse, tracking architecture.

As we’re thinking through a bit more holistically in terms of all of our data functions that are supporting marketing, I identify, what do we need to drive decision making for our marketing organization and not only how does data science and analytics fit into that, but what is the infrastructure we need from a data engineering perspective that would enable us to be able to do this work?

Yes, it’s not necessarily my vision or my strategy that will get us there but working really closely with our Head of Data Platform so that my vision and his vision are really aligned together and we’re thinking through a bit more holistically as we’re building that out.

How long is it? My current focus is on building out a 1 year, 3 year, and a 5 year roadmap to really have some intermediate stages along the way that we’re getting towards.